pidgin

pidgin

(pĭj`ən), a lingua francalingua franca, an auxiliary language, generally of a hybrid and partially developed nature, that is employed over an extensive area by people speaking different and mutually unintelligible tongues in order to communicate with one another......Click the link for more information. that is not the mother tongue of anyone using it and that has a simplified grammar and a restricted, often polyglot vocabulary. The earliest documented pidgin is the Lingua Franca (or Sabir) that developed among merchants and traders in the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages; it remained in use through the 19th cent. Other known pidgins have been employed in different regions since the 17th cent. An example is the variety of pidgin English that resulted from contacts between English traders and the Chinese in Chinese ports. In fact, the word pidgin supposedly is a Chinese (Cantonese) corruption of the English word business. Another well-known form of pidgin English is the Beach-la-Mar (or Bêche-de-Mer) of the South Seas. The different kinds of pidgin English have preserved the basic grammatical features of English, at the same time incorporating a number of non-English syntactical characteristics. The great majority of words in pidgin English are of English origin, but there are also Malay, Chinese, and Portuguese elements. As a result of European settlers bringing to the Caribbean area large numbers of slaves from West Africa who spoke different languages, other pidgins evolved in that region that were based on English, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and Spanish. Examples of pidgins based on non-European languages are Chinook, once used by Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, and Lingua Gêral, based on a Native American language and used in Brazil. The Krio language of Sierra Leone and Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea are examples of creoles, pidgins that have acquired native speakers. See also creole languagecreole language, any language that began as a pidgin but was later adopted as the mother tongue by a people in place of the original mother tongue or tongues. Examples are the Gullah of South Carolina and Georgia (based on English), the creole of Haiti (based on French), and.....Click the link for more information..

One of these recent critics is Emeka Okeke-Ezigbo, who, in an interesting but somewhat acerbic article, opines that Pidgin is a "practical, viable, flexible language distilled in the alembic of our native sensibility and human experience.

they summarize Peter Muhlhausler's and Roger Keesing's work on pidgins and creoles and refer to the extremely interesting and at times quite hot and polemical debate between these two scholars in the second half of the 1980s on the origin and development of pidgins, especially on the role of the substrate language;

It would also make sense that Chinese has almost no morphology since it is one of the first casualties in cases of massive language shift, much in the same way morphology disappears in cases of pidgin or creole languages.

Examples of what look like the transitive suffix in other English-lexicon pidgins and creoles, particularly some of the West African varieties, appear to be largely sporadic and never to have become fully grammaticalized.

The grammar proper is preceded by a socio-linguistic history of Nubi people, and followed by an attempt to reconstruct some language features through comparative analysis with the Arabic pidgins Turku and Juba Arabic and with the Egyptian and Sudanese Arabic dialects.

Their topics include from repetition to reduplication in Riau Indonesian, reduplication and consonant mutation in the Northern Atlantic languages, non-adjacency, enhancing contrast, phrasal reduplication and dual description, syntactic reduplication in Arabic, the Vedic verb, child language, pidgins and creoles, intensity and diminution triggered by reduplicating morphology, and American Sign Language.

2) for 60 varieties of English, including national standard; regional, ethnic, and social; pidgins and creoles; and the major English as a second language varieties of the British Isles, Americas and Caribbean, Pacific and Australasia, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia.

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